Finally have a chance to sit down and breathe. My goodness, what a week!
Last thursday, Maryl and I drove maaaaaaaany hours down to Gary Indiana, ok well not Gary but Bloomingsomething Indiana to go visit Benny and Mugsy. Along the way we stopped off for Maryl to say goodbye to her great-grandmother, who could claim being the progenitor of 100+ bodies of this earth. That's quite a feat! And the bonus, being completely loved and adored, revered and admired. It was a welcomed and known passing, and that weekend many were able to say their goodbyes in person. Le sigh, anyway.
It added a few hours to an already 11-hour driving spree trip, thus we arrived at Ben and Meg's at around 4 or 5 in the morning. The crazy idea was to spend Thursday driving, meet with B+M and enjoy a nice weekend, then drive back Sunday morning. That's a lot of driving for a couple days, I know. But the drive itself was nice, and of course the company was splendid. We bought 8 tapes for the trip, including one of Bruce Willis singing his heart out (???), but unfortunately the tape player in the car didn't want to function. Good for us, the radio was a godsend, literally, and once in Indiana, four out of every five stations was a type of country. It was exciting and sad at the same time. But boy howdy, when Rush or Kansas came on? It was like those 4 minutes didn't even exist.
We got a tour of the campus from Meg on Friday while Ben was finishing his last bits of work. Lawyer schools look a lot like normal schools. There were plenty of students, and plenty of student housing and plenty of student eateries. Unfortunately, no Jamba Juice, which I crave and miss. Ah, strawberry surfriders. There was a mall-ish thing nearby, where we happily picked up a giant blue rattlesnake (stuffed, and cute), for Holden for our return. It's customary to bribe kids with big, blue stuffed things when you go on little trips without them, I assume.
But my goodness, and this is all Meg's fault - we went to the Hobby Lobby near there. You know those statues of chickens? Or those pictures of them on the wall? That look kinda kitsch, kinda campy, kinda fun? Image a store about the same size as Wal$Mart, but filled to the brim with those suckers. And much, much more! My personal favorite was a bird-feeder in the shape of a giant, tubby cat, with a big hole in his stomach where the bird can come in and out -- and the cat was looking down at his gaping stomach, with a knife and fork primed in either hand. Time stood still in that store, and we left a little older, a little wiser, and with 27/28ths of our souls intact.
Dinner that night was Indian, and it was truly lovely to have some Chicken Tikka Marsala that wasn't either A) covered in cilantro or B) large slabs of chicken in a semi-disgusting, non-creamy sauce. Megan made cookies at home for dessert, where we were enthralled with their giant, giant, giant tv blasting out ps3 games. Unfortunately for us all, the ps3 is seriously lacking in any games that may or may not be fun. There simply aren't enough at all. The one game that was almost appealing was some sort of gauntlet-game but with marvel comic heroes instead. I was Thor. He was a comic book hero? I thought he was a Norse God. No, he's a comic hero. And there was Iron Man, and some guy that looked gay, and that other guy that looked gay, and the fantastic four, with the main guy who could blow up his hands to be big but he was gay too, in the sense that he was lame, and don't get me wrong I love gay men but if they can blow up their hands, they can blow up other things too but he never, ever, ever did or even though about it or else all the female enemies would be blown away with awesomeness. What am I talking about? Oh yeah, there was the xmen too, and someone who looked like a ninja, and we fought people called Radioactive Man and Black Widow seemed evil, and there was that other evil guy and also the giant dragon (???) who apparently was a comic book villain??? We shot him with lasers. I'd probably enjoy it all a lot more if I knew who anyone was. Ben was captain america. :(
For dinner next, we had a nice big bbq where I watched Ben put on GIANT slabs of chicken meat into his griller. I was sad and surprised by this, because I didn't think such big pieces of chicken would ever cook correctly, but I was shamed into happy deliciousness when I was proved oh-so wrong. Nice work! During dinner we got a call from Steve regarding things I'm sure he'd be happy to talk about and comment on, if that is in fact true.
oh! We also role-played that weekend, which was something I've been missing in my life. The idea was fantastic - roll up undead characters. Ben had a book and ruleset for being undead classes, such as ghouls and mummies and some sort of tentacle-rape skeleton that had giant purple-penis-tongues. Yeah, I was a mummy. Maryl took the ghoul and Meg chose just a normal evil cleric with lots of evil spells from another evil tome of evilness Ben had lying around. And yet we're all specifically not in some sort of satanic-cult? It's true! It's just good clean fun.
We played a bunch the next day since it was raining (???) there. It was pretty interesting and fun, but it had its problems. Being undead is a lot different than roleplaying an evil character. You can't go in towns. You can't really talk to someone. Mummies get -4 to int so I had to roleplay someone with a 7 IQ (10 is normal), since I rolled poorly anyway. So most of my dialogue was, ".... ... ... VENGEANCE!!!" Maryl was an uncaring but hungry ghoul, so all her plans involved "Why don't you two stay here and discuss, while I go off and kill off the adventurers heading toward our doom-cave and eat them." So it was up to Meg to actually talk to npcs and come up with anything worthwhile. Still fun, just hindering to have one person in charge of all of that while others get a time-out. Maybe we'll pick up disguises at some point, since the one time I did get to talk to an npc farmer, I had to tell him I was a leper or else he'd get wise up and get the pitchfork out, but all that did was stigma Meg as a leper-lover, and she was barred from town.
But I think even more hindersome to the game was the ruleset for undead. They get lots of advantages of disadvantages, such as immunities to disease, paralysis, etc, but the harshest of all is you're at about 1/2 the hp you should be at your level (due to having a nil con), AND! and, get this, when you hit 0 hp you simply are destroyed. There's no staggering, and there's no bleeding down to -10 so your friends have a chance to save you. In the first fight, a stupid low-level wizard hit me with a scorching ray (yay mummy vulnerabilities to fire), and Ben just had to roll all 6's with his 4 dice, and was so impressed with himself that he SHOWED us instead of fudging it behind his dm-blocker. So in the first round of combat I took JUST enough to out-right kill me. Boom, headshot, and et cetera. He was nice enough to allow us ways to bring me back, he's nice like that. But in the second combat we had, a fireball came our way - and of course I learned my lesson from last time and had Meg hit me with a 50-damage fire resist spell, but poor Maryl took the brunt of it, and only having 24 hp at level 5 (!!!), took a stupid swing from a normal hit and was out as well. So, I dunno, we're powerful but at the same time, terribly, terribly vulnerable to being deadified for reals. All in good fun; I hope it's a campaign that works out all the kinks and becomes a favored pastime. Since WoW sucks. Yeah, I said it. During summer, at least.
Anyway.
Sunday rolled around and off rolled around us for our 11 hours back. Got home around 2 am and slept a solid five hours before work the next day.
I can't even remember Monday. Things are a blur, but I think it was unpacking day. Since, we're at our new house and all. Oh we were planning on getting a piano moved in that day (!!!) for fun and musicing, but the people we were getting it from were old and forgetful and weren't around for the movers. Blah well - we got it Tuesday, and it's fairly decent for $250. Needs a good tuning! But then every Friday we have promised to make music night. She's a flautist, can you even imagine? Music! It's wonderful, or so I've always thought.
Tuesday afternoon we drove 3 hours down in the blistering sun (!!!), in a car with Holden and Maryl's two sisters, to a little town in Canada called Saint Catherine’s. Which is where the wake/memorial/funeral thing was being held for her great-grandmother, who by the way was Holden's great-GREAT-grandmother. That's great! The drive wasn't, though. Our AC in the car doesn't work (first time we had a need to try it...). It was a tough trip; its length, the reason for the destination, the temperature, the traffic.. but we got there in one piece. A couple hours later, it was another 3 hours driving back. Lots of driving! I swore never to drive again. On the way back, my oil light flickered on, which scared me. I knew enough to know that the light doesn't mean you need an oil change, it means that your oil volume is low. Blast it, I was JUST about to go in for a change/refilling. It was an adventure trying to find a gas station - took about 15 minutes more of driving around aimlessly and blindly. Yes, gas this exit sign, but they don't say WHERE, those jerks. Left? Right? For how long? In the end one was found, oil was purchased -- I hawed a bit at the engine trying to figure out what I was supposed to do to where, but I'm alive now to tell about it so it must have been some sort of success.
Wednesday was supposed to be relaxing day, but I had a bojillian errands to run, including license plate re-registration, oil changing at wal$mart, this, that, Holden errands, etc. That night I plonked down at 8:30 pm I was so exhausted - from the heat, all the driving, everything.
Thusday was nice and fun - they had a big event downtown here for "emergency preparedness week", where they had a bunch of firetrucks and emergency vehicles all set up for people to walk in and peruse and to touch and to talk to the people who run them and get info and have fun. Perfect for a 3 year old who loves fire engines, ya know? The problem was it was technically his Dad's time with him, so we called him up and let him know about the exciting stuff downtown, but he was too busy playing with his friends or something to bother with it, so we happily took time off work and snuck Holden out of daycare early to go see all the excitement. He was so, so happy to be able to sit up in the firetruck and pretend to drive it, and to see the firemen and policemen there. There was one display of a "rollover simulator", where they show you just what happens if you rollover in your car without a seatbelt. We were transfixed, staring at this dummy flopping around in his car while it was cycling around in a big circle, when all of a sudden the dummy FLEW right out of the window and almost hit Holden as we were watching. Scared the bejesus out of him, but 5 minutes later he wanted to see it again. :P I think he'll be sure to wear his seatbelt in the future, nonetheless. (Not that we'd ever let him go without!)
Thursday night Maryl had so much work she had to stay up all night to complete it - and I helped out as best I could (after a nap >_>) until we finished around 6am. And here it is Friday night - I've sent off my mother's day stuff, got a gift for Maryl too (happy mother's day! here's Castlevania! <3), and finally have a chance to type here while she takes a snooze.
Would that all weeks be this exciting? (!!!)